This session was (yes that's right, a retrospective, and therefore succinct, blogpost) about the involvement of a subject librarian along with an instructional designer in the development and delivery of a fully online distance learning course. At first I thought that this would be one of those "nothing new" sessions - of course the presenters were interesting and engaging and were clearly passionate but not the premise of involving a subject librarian to support students throughout an online course is a no brainer to me.
But there were a few interesting take-aways:
They talked about their perception of the traditional model for course development (ie what they thought was broken) - body of content transmitted from faculty to student, and during the development and introduction, the faculty member works with a subject librarian to develop resources for the course and also works (quite seperately) with an instructional designer (that's us in US terms) to develop the curriculum design, and the students get a standard 45 minutes information resources induction. The librarian and instructional designer did not work together with the academic and in many cases never even met - seeing their two areas as unrelated and leaving the faculty member to make the connections (or not) for themselves.....sound familiar? I think we have the opportunity to provide a much more joined up development process, if we wanted to.
The two presenters had taken a different approach and worked together on the design and development and also encouraged involvement with the students by the librarian throughout the course - so were addressing what they thought was broken - however it was clear that they did it because they were both interested in each others work and had built up a personal relationship - nothing was expected or embedded, nor was the approach (even with their demostrable successes) being adopted by other colleagues at the institution. Again, similar to our experiences, and how some good practice happens, but I think to do this effectively it needs to bought into and applied systematically.
They talked a bit about the Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) Community of inquiry model - worth checking out from an e-supported distance learning perspective as is the Xu and Morris (2007) article on Collaborative Course Development for Online Courses. (I have the references on a handout, but if you can't wait for me to get back, check out the handout at http://www.educause.edu/ELI081/Program/13300?PRODUCT_CODE=ELI081/SESS18#available_resources
They also had an "instructional support" checklist - a bit like an information resources version of the module planning doc that Brian and Juliun have been working on - take a look: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/instruction/checklist.html
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4 comments:
Continuing the theme of going to NC university sessions I see.
Absolutely....and it's not over yet - more today. Also Kay and I were talking to a guy from Davidson College near Charlotte at lunch yesterday.
I'm gonna get an NC university loyalty card and get a stamp from each one I encounter - I think there might be a prize when I get the full set :-)
My younger brother went to Davidson. Real interesting college, with an amazing honor code. Students can take their exams whenever they want during a few week period (just pick up the paper and time yourself for an hour, returning it to the library when you are done). Or notices such as "I found $20 outside. If it's yours, just let me know"
You're right! - that is exactly what we were talking to about at lunch.
Impressive/strange
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